NATURAL PROTECTION
Mike Wooldridge, the BBC Bureau Chief in New Delhi, visited our office on January 16, 1998, with his TV team. He recorded an interview with me for their English broadcast.
One of his questions was: “The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is generally considered an anti-Muslim party. If the BJP wins the twelfth Indian parliamentary elections to be held in February 1998 and forms the central government, do you see it as a threat to Muslims?” I replied, “Not at all. Any political party that wins an election and comes to power does so only for a few years, and its power is never absolute. We have a formal constitution here. Every government has to operate under this constitution, not independently of it.”
They said that the Indian Constitution grants the ruling party the power to impose an emergency, which Indira Gandhi used in 1975 to declare one, thereby gaining the authority to take arbitrary actions. Similarly, if the BJP comes to power and declares an emergency, they would gain unlimited powers under the same constitution, enabling them to do whatever they want against Muslims.
I replied, “Such a kind of holocaust is not repeatable in human history. You cannot drop an atomic bomb again and again.” This means such a grave event is never repeated. You can drop an atomic bomb only once; it is not possible to drop one repeatedly.
I stated that, based on this principle, I had the courage to declare on December 4, 1992, when the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya was demolished, that no other mosque in this country would be demolished. People regarded the December 6, 1992 incident as a comma. I said that it is not a comma, but a full stop.
And you know that this is exactly what happened. The demolishers had a list of many more mosques they intended to target, but the law of nature erased their list like a wrong letter. It was no longer possible for them to repeat December 6 with any other mosque.
When the Babri Mosque was demolished on December 6, 1992, Shiv Sena leader Mr. Bal Thackeray said he was proud of those who brought it down. However, in newspapers from the same month, Bal Thackeray’s statement appeared stating that neither a mosque nor a temple should be built on the site of the Babri Mosque. Instead, both communities should be given land to build a mosque and a temple in a more confined area, and a national memorial should be built where the Babri Mosque once stood. In this regard, the Congress party apologized to Muslims, saying that although Congress was in power at the time, they could not save the Babri Mosque. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also announced that the issue of the temple and mosque is not on its agenda.
The system of this world is designed so that no great evil can last forever. Whenever significant wrongdoing or serious crime occurs, opposing forces start to gather right away. In the end, a situation develops where such evil or oppression can’t happen again.
If someone tells you they will bring the sky down on your head, you should not argue with them. Instead, stay silent, knowing that it’s beyond their power to do so. Similarly, if a political party or leader uses lofty words against you, consider whether such things are even possible before taking action. If it’s not possible, then there’s no need to worry. No one in this world has the power to turn their words into reality. Only things that match the facts become reality, not just spoken words.
